by Ioana Marinescu & Robert Fearns
UK / 2006 / 24 mins / English

Wednesday 7 March 2007

within the Bartlett Urban Film Society, University of Central London
18.15 for 18.30, Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building , Gower Street London WC1 6BT

Free entrance

Bucharest , 1984: Romania ’s dictator Ceausescu decides to erase one third of the old town, to flatten the city’s only hill, and to raise over the bulldozed area his ‘People’s Palace’ and the ‘Victory of Socialism Boulevard’. From one day to another, thousands of houses are demolished, historical monuments destroyed, churches removed; countless people displaced in cloak-and-dagger operations to poorly built flats at the periphery of the city.

Bucharest , 2000: What is left when there is nothing left? What reawakens memories? Where are they preserved? Is private remembering alienated by organised forgetting?

The premise of the film is to tell the story of this part of Bucharest that gradually falls into oblivion. The former inhabitants of the demolished houses keep alive the memory of this lost place. Their verbal recollections in interviews alternate with the voice of the narrator, while the camera moves from present sites to stills and archival images.

‘Don’t miss Robert Fearns and Ioana Marinescu’s 25-minute video Off the Map: a journey to parts of Bucharest that Ceausescu flattened in the 1980s, troubled and elegiac in tone.’
(Andrew Mead, Critic’s Choice in Architects’ Journal 23.11.06)

Ioana Marinescu (b. 1973, Romania ) is a Ratiu Foundation Alumnus. She works as an architect and photographer in London .

Robert Fearns (b 1954, UK ) is a senior lecturer in Fine Art Media at the Bath Spa University .

The film is part of a research project developed between 2002 and 2006, with the support of The Ratiu Foundation UK , Pro Patrimonio Foundation and Bath Spa University .

More details on Ioana Marinescu at www.ioanamarinescu.com .